JournalTOCs

Journal of the Early Republic
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.19

Number of Followers: 15

Full-text available via subscription

Subscription journal
ISSN (Print) 0275-1275 - ISSN (Online) 1553-0620
Published by Project MUSE

[305 journals]

“Capacity for Labor,” Work, and Disability in the Early
Republic, 1791–1833
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: What did it mean in the early republic to be a “disabled’” laborer' In an era of epidemics, rudimentary sanitation, harsh climates, experimental medicine, and unforgiving working conditions, illness and impairment were inextricable from the working lives of early national wage laborers. In the northeastern states of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, where urban wage labor and manufacturing were expanding particularly rapidly, healthy, physically versatile workers were few and far between. From 1790 to 1810, the urban populations of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York grew by 84 percent, 114 percent, and 191 percent, respectively. As new government-endorsed manufacturing enterprises juddered ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender,
Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Angelica Carter was a merchant’s wife. In the three years she lived in Boston, between 1777 and 1780, she gave birth to two children—Philip and Catherine. She was also a woman of elegant taste, sociable disposition, and universally attested charm. The combination of these facts may seem innocuous enough. Yet Carter found that, in revolutionary New England, expectations about how she should conduct herself sometimes conflicted with her inclinations. One occasion in particular stuck in her memory. “Going down one morning into her husband’s office, not much decked out, but in a rather elegant French undress,” she found herself an object of interest to at least one of the room’s occupants. “A farmer of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Introduction: Hog Reeves Are Part of the State, Too
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Sure, by the 1790s most Americans knew who George Washington was. But could he order them out of town, or collect their debts to a neighbor' Could His Excellency keep your hog out of my cabbage patch' No. It was local officials, like overseers of the poor, sheriffs, and hog reeves, who could do that. Local governments shaped the lives of early republic Americans more profoundly than national or state-level government did. And yet, we historians of the early republic talk about local government the least. This forum nudges our historiography to look more squarely at how governance worked at the municipal level. Of course we need to know about Washington’s government. But if we focus only on that, ignoring night ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Quotidian State: Nightly Watches and Police Practice in the Early
Republic
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: In cities and towns across the fledgling nation, night watches performed quotidian tasks that were foundational to order and infrastructures of law, and by extension, the building of the early American state. Watchkeeping—as an institution and a practice—was an ancient and customary form of policing that used movement and surveillance to underwrite stability over the night in locales. Individual watchmen and night constables performed essential labor to safeguard communities from danger and enabled activities ranging from democratic participation to trade. The practice of setting a watch, like other routine tasks related to the larger processes and networks of state development in the early republic, has been ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Overseers of the Poor: Relief, Surveillance, and Control in the Early
Republic Northeast
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Overseers of the Poor acted as the ears, arms, and feet of the state in the early American republic. They interviewed and surveilled the people who resided in and passed through their communities, conducting “examinations of paupers” to determine their settlement, and keeping ledgers with lists of the non-residents who requested assistance. They determined who possessed legal settlement in their municipality, providing relief and assistance to the legally settled residents of said municipality in the form of food, firewood, clothing, shelter, and sometimes money. They issued “orders of removal” for people who lacked legal settlement, so that they could be escorted out of town by constables until they reached a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
“Every Cord that Binds together the People to the Government”: Local
Magistracy and the Making of an Adjudicatory State in Early New York
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that Americans pursued “local independence” to the extent of creating an “absence of what we would call government or administration.” Citing New York State as a leading example, on the other hand, Tocqueville noted an unmistakable rise in the power of American state governments, manifested in their increasing capability and willingness to manage local affairs. How should we strike a balance, then, between stressing the centrifugal and centralizing aspects of early American governance' That is a question that has remained central to recent scholarship on the early American state. While acknowledging the overall decentralized nature of antebellum governance ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Sheriff’s Sword: Property, Democracy, and Public Order in Early
Republic Massachusetts
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Following a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on April 2, 1829, Suffolk County Sheriff Charles P. Sumner privately debated if he should hang up his sword. How and why he did reveals the ways sheriffs stood at the intersection of debates regarding governance, law-making, and the marketplace. Examining sheriffs can help us understand how court officials preserved political and economic order while also struggling to ensure their own professional legitimacy and prosperity. During the eighteenth century, the sword-wielding county sheriff was a crucial figure in local governance who protected hierarchy, the rule of law, and the king’s peace. The sheriff’s place in American society shifted during the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Conclusion: The State and Local–Legal Governance in the Early
American Republic
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: The local and the legal—two factors that are absolutely indispensable to fully reckoning with the history of the early American state. The essays in this forum—on nightwatchmen, overseers of the poor, justices of the peace, and sheriffs—together break refreshing new ground on the centrality of the practices of local officeholders to the actual form and substance of so much of early American governance. Gabriel Loiacono’s capacious Introduction nicely captures the unique historical and historiographical intervention here, arguing that “local governments shaped the lives of early republic Americans,” and that we ignore these crucial sites of social and political contest and action at our peril.All of the authors in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America by Ana Schwartz
(review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: When Perry Miller published the essay “Errand into the Wilderness” in 1956, he declared at the outset that he intended to consider the woodlands only as a metaphor for the Puritan spiritual condition. Claiming that “wilderness” was merely a figure of speech in the mouth of the Puritan minister whose 1670 sermon title had furnished him with his essay title, Miller explained that he too would deliberately avoid any analytical engagement with the Puritans’ actual location in the forest, in what he called “the vacant wilderness of America” (Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness [Cambridge, MA, 1956], vii). In Miller’s telling, English migrants arrived in North America eager to show their brethren back home how to conduct ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Prisoners of Congress: Philadelphia’s Quakers in Exile, 1777–1778 by
Norman E. Donoghue II (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: The Continental Congress’s decision to exile twenty Philadelphia men, mainly Quakers, for treason in 1777–78 has received limited attention from historians, but Norman E. Donoghue II impressively reconstructs the episode in Prisoners of Congress and argues for its significance. Donoghue’s book focuses on the Quakers who, long accustomed to dominating colonial Pennsylvanian politics, struggled to accept the new reality of an independent Pennsylvania. Invoking their religious testimonies, Philadelphia Quakers often refused to quarter or supply troops from the British and Continental armies. Yet many Quakers tacitly preferred the loyalist cause and showed their displeasure with the patriots through actions like ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America by
Jacqueline Beatty (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Through close readings of legal documents from Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia, Jacqueline Beatty has identified how American women of the late eighteenth century were able to make rhetorical use of their subordinate, dependent status to argue with representatives of state authority for specific instances of freedom. The gain might be as narrow as that of Rebecca Tarbell, who successfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Assembly for freedom of movement to join her husband in Newport (17), or as far-ranging as when Jane Lamboll and her husband Carolina worked together to free her from enslavement (140). In hundreds of cases, women used similar language affirming their patience, obedience, high morality ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic,
1776–1830 by Keri Holt (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Many literary scholars have drawn on the work of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983) to argue that print culture served to homogenize and nationalize American identities in the early republic. However, English scholar and cultural historian Keri Holt contends that Americans of the time interpreted their national identity through the principles of federalism, which allowed them to maintain diverse local identities as they formed a larger cohesive unit. By examining maps, symbolic imagery, almanacs, satire, magazines, and captivity narratives, Holt argues that both the form and content of early American “print culture encouraged citizens to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature: Economic Insights of
American Women Writers, 1852–1869 by Kristin Allukian (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature offers close readings of texts by four canonical nineteenth-century women authors—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Larcom, Harriet Jacobs, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—to show how these authors used their imaginative writings to intervene in the economic debates of their time. Allukian convincingly shows that women’s imaginative writings should be read as economic theory and as part of a broader (male-dominated) conversation about the relationship between slavery and capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States economy. Drawing on Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman’s concept of “slavery’s capitalism,” a term that identifies slavery as the driving force behind ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth
Century ed. by Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Revolutions and Reconstructions provides a much-needed recasting of America’s political heritage. Revisiting and developing the arguments made by a number of seasoned historians—e.g., Benjamin Quarles, Sterling Stuckey, Leon Litwack, Phyllis Field, Kathryn Grover, and Stephen Kantrowitz, to name a few—the authors of Revolutions and Reconstructions focus directly on the political engagement of African Americans between the Revolution and Reconstruction, presenting a history that challenges the long-held premise that black activism between the antebellum and postbellum period was merely “prepolitical” or “potentially politicized” (6). “[F]ormal black politics,” editors Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher argue, “did ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United
States by Justine S. Murison (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Justine Murison’s Faith in Exposure might best be read backwards. Begin with the last section of the last chapter, “Inviolate Personality.” Here Murison focuses on the famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” which would be so influential in twentieth-century jurisprudence. In an argument that would become foundational to abortion rights and marriage-equality cases, Warren and Brandeis posited “that the true and authentic self is a private one” (208), and they rooted the sense of privacy in home, marriage, and sexual morality. Murison notes that “[t]heir breakthrough was to explicitly name a new right for the cultural belief” that had been “emerging ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early
American Science by Catherine McNeur (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: Mischievous Creatures is an accomplished history of two naturalist sisters in nineteenth-century America, Elizabeth Carrington Morris and Margaretta Hare Morris. Catherine McNeur presents the legacies of these neglected women with careful attention to the social factors that limited their involvement in professionalized science—most prominently, gender (8). For non-specialist readers, the book contains a valuable overview of gender inequalities in scientific practice and culture, along with the changes in professional science over the course of the nineteenth century and its development into the highly specialized and credentialed field it is today. The elucidation of how “women’s work”—collecting, preserving, and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00
The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s by Alexander Nemerov (review)
- Free pre-print version: Loading...
  Rate this result: What is this?
  
  Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
  A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
  
  Abstract: This book is based on Alexander Nemerov’s presentations for the 66th annual Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2017. It aims to invent a (supposedly) “lost world” of America during the 1830s, organized around both the fact and idea of the nation’s forests. Complemented by a stunning set of 59 color and 7 black-and-white images, the text is arranged in loosely related “episodes” that range in focus on customary people and places of the era (ix). Tocqueville shows up almost right away, of course, and he is joined by the likes of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman, Helen Jewett and Fanny Kemble, and James Fenimore Cooper and Andrew Jackson. This list of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-07-19T00:00:00-05:00

HOME > Browse the 73 Subjects covered by JournalTOCs
Subject	Total Journals